Comic 1089 - Plan for tomorrow

Author Notes:

You decide that a spa day might not be such a bad idea, after all. As aware as you are that you need to stay focused, and that a lot is at stake... you can't shoulder the weight of the world constantly, or you're going to break. You finally have room for a day off--you need to take that opportunity while it lasts.

Zene, his parents, and Pierce can also get some time to explore Ilworth and stretch their legs a bit tomorrow.

"I'll start looking into car rentals, then," Fuse says. "And figuring out what a good place to hit up would be."

"We oughta find out if they got any good bars, there, too," Caius adds. "Y'know... with better beer than last time."

"Hell," Michelle says, "we could go all the way... get hotel rooms and stuff. Sleep on somethin' besides those stiff ass Zone Fifty beds tomorrow night, and drive back the next morning."

While the others continue to talk about tomorrow, you bring your focus back to the monsterized Knox in your red.

You make an effort to try and keep him alive--patching up the parts of him that are decaying and breaking down. It's... kind of an odd experience, altering someone who's completely in your red--all the materials you could need are just... there. Knox is totally suspended in it, and you can easily shift materials directly into his body.

...You still have blood on the bunker floor, from when you were experimenting with meat walls. You never really bothered to clean it up, and everyone's just been kind of... stepping around it. You consciously turn it back into a proper portal, and try to locate Knox relative to its entry point.

Though Mom's red never really explained how to blood speak, you ... kind of already know, you think. You duplicate the motions you felt in your blood when the mouth first tried to speak to you--

everyone stops talking, wincing, and turning toward you.

You quickly apologize, and tell them you're trying something.

You try blood speak again, but... quieter? More internally? You can't really describe it well, but you do it more... inwardly. It's still incredibly uncomfortable for you, but you manage to do it without affecting the whole room.

Once you've... sort of started getting the hang of it, you try doing it to the blood in Knox. Mom's red said you needed to resonate, whatever that means.

It takes you a while, but... you... think you manage to locate Knox in the red? At least, relative distance and... direction...

it makes your head spin a bit. The distance and direction is not 1:1 to this plane of existence. Knox is drifting some inordinate distance from where the portal in the church should have been... but he's not drifting at any appreciable pace, so it's definitely not just that he's been traveling. The physical space of the red doesn't... really match up with physical space here, not in a way you can immediately deduce.

In short: Knox is very, very far from your portal in Bunker A.

Comments:

Well, we don't technically need him to be at Bunker A. (I mean, we don't technically need him at ALL, but...) We could check his distance to the pool of blood on Mine's bed in her old house-- it was previously used as a portal exit, after all.

Yeah, but it's probably not very nice to leave him like that. Especially since we're in the rare situation of knowing exactly what his repaired body should be like (since he and Caius are clones). At minimum, fixing him would be good practice for the next time one of our friends gets maimed.

Hmm. If the red doesn't match up with physical reality 1:1, can we... tesseract, essentially? Can we somehow *fold* the red to move there closer to here? If we don't think we can manage that without breaking our brain or at least exhausting ourselves, that's fine-- just something to think about for the future. The red is infinite, but it might also possibly be more *malleable* than this dimension.

Perhaps we should practice locating things in the red by scattering some blood in different locations (maybe some in bunker A, some in bunker D, some in bunker E) and placing blooded items through, then trying to find those items in the red. We can also try to propel items through the red, then attempt to sense where they would be relative to our dimension once they get to some arbitrary distance away in red-distance.

Since it's likely impossible to get Knox out of the red (at least for now), can we observe him in there and try to learn as much as possible about his structure, tissues, biological processes, brain usage, etc.? Do Thale-monsters work in roughly the same way as their base forms do, in regards to how their cells function? What causes the decay-- is it the fact that they're not digesting food to nourish cells and create new ones, or not breathing enough air to re-oxygenate cells, or the cells themselves are dying at an accelerated rate?

Can we determine what the flesh making up the Knoxstrosity came from-- since Thale doesn't have a red and thus has to portal flesh from other blooded creatures under his control, does the flesh appear to be made from other people (and if so, very few, meaning they'd likely all be drained by it, or very many, meaning he might skim flesh from a lot of people at once?), from biopaste, from secretaries? We might not be able to parse DNA all the way, but we might be able to peer into the cells and see if their DNA is the same or different.

For tomorrow, let's be careful to not blow all of our expenses on the day off too, I don't think we've stumbled upon some good amount of money recently and I'm thinking Gesenai's stack that she gave us with the hummer has been dwindling ever since that time. So we might have enough for a spa, but not for a hotel,

Medical work. Finch is a doctor, Mine is a nurse; both some of the highest paid professions there are. And with blood abilities, the duo is insanely better than any other doctor/nurse combo globally, and if Mine can figure out how to withdraw her blood completely after making something, they can do it without sacrificing their morals.

Long story short, they'd be great for doing doctoring work for really rich people; and at their skill level, they could be picky about only doing it for rich people that are really good humanitarians. Just one insanely difficult-to-pull of surgery on record is all that's needed.

I would suggest doing it in a different region than we operate out of, however, (ha ha). But now that sensing stuff in the blood is a thing, simply put a blood portal on a sheet of paper and mail it to the appropriate country to someone paid to pick it up and deliver it to an empty location.

The problem is, doctorin' isn't really work you can just show up to when you have free time. And any place that looks up our credentials could probably be traced, or turn on us if they discover we're fugitives.

We should maybe practice making our own blood-brutes in case Thale decides to drop subtlety and go ham. I would recommend trying to make them look prettier than what Thale's been using, as if we end up fighting in the streets other people hopefully will notice ours are nice and not shoot at them. Something reptile-like with bone scales (dragons!) shouldn't be too hard. Somebody else mentioned this, but we could have them grow out of little blood-bugs like the one we used in the church. Maybe have them create a protective egg first so they don't get injured during the growth process?

Hmm. Can we make animal-level brains? Putting something around the level of a dog into our brutes would ease a lot of strain on Mine, as she wouldn't have to control each one specifically. Although getting them to not attack the wrong people might be hard.

Bit of body horror here, but could we make a retractable stinger in Mine's arm? Something that we could use to inject blood into someone (or something) that nobody can take away might be useful. Unless we can figure out how to yell in blood-speak. Eh, ignore this bit.

The fact that blood-speak hurts (or something) could possibly be used offensively. If we could make something else use the blood-speak it could be used to disable hostiles, especially if we can "yell" using it. Or if we don't have friends in the immediate area Mine could "yell". Or does it only work on blooded people? We should check with Grizwald and some guy who got Queened.

Are we still limited to one blood alarm? We've been doing some quite crazy stuff for a while, did we level up that skill yet?

Is the acid spider damaging the table?

We should put blood portals in every bunker we've been to, just in case something happens to the doorway. Hopefully we won't need it, as travelling through the red will probably be horrifying for, well, everybody.

How are we for money? Do we still have an unspecified but large amount of it?

Can we control how fast something exits a portal from the red? Cuz bone machine gun.

Can we pull food/water/air from the red? Another thing that could be useful but I really hope we won't need.

If we're doing the spa tomorrow, I'd like to make a quick show of reuniting the ghost girls.

It can be a low-stress affair: Put Edison in one of the containment chambers, let Tesla and Faraday talk to her, and if she'll play nice we can let her out and that'll be that.
They've already got Tesla's stuff and catching up to keep them busy. And if we've got any funds left after the spa trip we could get Edison a proper sewing needle (instead of a giant, person-stabbing one) and some thread/twine/yarn to keep her out of mischief on the way back from the spa trip.

Moving things in the Red should be feasible and probably fairly easy; it seems to respond to Mine's will. It might be possible to move him just by imagining his location in the Red as being adjacent to her. Otherwise she might simply make a crude connector in there and reel him in.

First things first let's reunite the ghost girls with edison in a containment room preferable one that is not cracked. Then get ready for spa day.we are going to have to disguise Fuse though as he sticks out with his green hair and cybernetics. Probably dye his hair and cover up his leg.

People have raised a good point about money; We should maybe put Liz in charge of our accounts and finances, as she has experience with that kinda thing. She'd be good for overseeing other long term projects too, like the restoration of our new town, I mean she is literally built for management.

It's good we've got a solution for power, running water is the next priority. We should maybe put up some fences too. We should get Camp Mars papers, so they can go out and about, and see about giving them some money; They'll need a lot of stuff.